Wordpress 2.5, a half-assed review.

wordpress 2.5 admin

Good:

  • The design has been updated and is much less offensive to the eyes.
  • The dashboard has better information at first glance.
  • Dashboard widgets will probably be pretty cool.
  • The new flash uploader is a big improvement.
  • The new gallery feature seems pretty cute, although it isn’t the sort of thing I usually go in for.
  • Full screen post writing is nice if you have a lot to write.
  • Tag management / tag filling is handy.
  • The ability to define permalinks on the fly when writing a post is neat.

Bad:

  • The admin has a max-width that is very noticeable (annoying) on a widescreen monitor, especially because it is not centered.
  • I miss the categories being on the sidebar on the post pages.
  • Tags still are not searchable. Why are tags not searchable?
  • There is even more Javascript in the admin than before, for an impressive total of 324Kb, ~2 second load.

TBD:

  • Whether or not any of the cute little enhancements break the hell out of plugins that I don’t feel like updating.
  • Whether or not nightmarish new vulnerabilities have been introduced. With an update this big, it is almost a sure thing.

Watch Matt’s screencast for a quick overview, I have to update the rest of my sites.

addthis
  1. nocash's gravatar

    They have a list of compatible plugins. I only glanced through, but the only one that jumped out at me was Twitter Tools, which loses the ability to post from the sidebar. With twhirl, though, I doubt it matters.

    I bet it breaks the hell out of Hello Ninja, though :(

  2. cliff's gravatar

    How about that one-click plugin updating? I thought that was pretty sweet.

  3. atom's gravatar

    @cliff

    yeah, it will be cool when all plugins comply to it, and they change it so you don’t have to de/reactivate any plugin that is updated.

  4. Jacob Kennedy's gravatar

    I’m with you on the categories point. It was very handy on the sidebar.

    I love the media handling now. Major improvement.

    Why doesn’t the basic editor have some basic HTML formatting though. A quick dropdown for formatting a line as an h1 or an h2 would be usable for every level of user.

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